Category Technology/Electronics

The fungi Aspergillus niger (top left), Penicillium simplicissimum (top right) and Penicillium chrysogenum (bottom) can recycle cobalt and lithium from rechargeable batteries. Credit: Aldo Lobos

Although rechargeable batteries in smartphones, cars and tablets can be charged again and again, they don’t last forever. Old batteries often wind up in landfills or incinerators, potentially harming the environment. And valuable materials remain locked inside. Now, a team is turning to naturally occurring fungi to drive an environmentally friendly recycling process to extract cobalt and lithium from tons of waste batteries.

Although a global problem, the U.S. leads the way as the largest generator of electronic waste. It is unclear how many electronic products are recycled...

The charged tip of a scanning tunneling microscope and an additional magnetic field lead to localized stable electron states in graphene. Credit: Nils Freitag, RWTH Aachen

Scientists have created tiny quantum dots in graphene. In a tiny quantum prison, electrons behave quite differently as compared to their counterparts in free space. They can only occupy discrete energy levels, much like the electrons in an atom – for this reason, such electron prisons are often called “artificial atoms.” Artificial atoms may also feature properties beyond those of conventional ones, with the potential for many applications eg quantum computing. Such additional properties have now been shown for artificial atoms in graphene.

“Artificial atoms open up new, exciting possibilities, because we can directly tu...

Credit: Krzysztof Szczypiorski

What if you could hide messages in the tempo of that pounding music? It’s being done. A Polish scientist knows how to hide secret messages in music and is exploring results. ZME Science talked about his dealings with trance and techno, “electronic music meant to shake your mind and body with stomping rhythms and varying tempos.” The report in ZME Science said cybersecurity researcher Krzysztof Szczypiorski has produced tunes with hidden coded messages nested inside tempo variations.

The concept is musical steganography, and it involves coding messages in music...

Counter-rotating circularly polarized laser beams (red) are crossed in a gas target to generate angularly separated extreme ultraviolet (EUV) harmonics with right- and left-circular polarization (blue, purple, magenta). This method provides straightforward and robust control of the direction, polarization, and spectrum of the light, opening the door to investigating materials in ways that were never before possible. Credit: Image courtesy of Dan Hickstein and Steven Burrows, JILA

By crossing 2 counter-rotating ultrafast laser beams in a gas target, scientists controlled the direction and polarization of laser-like beams in the extreme UV and soft x-ray portions of the spectrum...